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Reading Glasses and Small Details

Reading glasses hang around my neck
And for what I do, it takes 10 pair make a season.

Something drilled a hole in the blueberry flower

Reading glasses make it a challenge when trying to catch a picture of small details such as pollen in a flower,
or the hairs on a sweat bee’s back.

Parenthesis Lady Beetle (Hippodamia parenthesis) on Aronia flower

And then what amazes me when I look at the pictures that I have tried to capture,
is that there is sometimes a even smaller detail discovered inside a small detail that I was hoping to get.

Something is eating the eggs on a red bud leaf

Now yes, I think I know what you’re thinking, “maybe stronger glasses might help”, certainly doing a better job of cleaning the ones I have would help.

A platygastrid wasp guarding the stink bug eggs into which she had inserted her own eggs and will remain until her brood is hatched

Yet sometimes, it like following Alice’s white rabbit down into the rabbit hole to a world that is always around us, part of us that isn’t observed or is hard to see and to imagine if you could look even deeper into a world that can’t be seen, even with much stronger glasses.

Cute little guy with fuzzy butt

Ants in the flowers of an Enkianthus

Mother is preparing dinner while the babies hatch

Ants farming aphids for honey dew

I might recommend a book by David George Haskell called ” The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature ” where he spend a year studying one square meter of old growth forest floor in Tenn. You might enjoy it